Category Archives: Critical Pedagogy

I was recently participating in a webinar about a MOOC-style first-year writing course, and a few words kept confusing me. Content. Delivery. Scale. . . . If you’re a teacher and have thought about these terms, here’s my humble attempt to think through the confusion.

What is the “content” of a writing course? Whatever text its instructor assigns students, right? How about the basic knowledge of terms and concepts, skills and conventions that students need to acquire? Citation guidelines, punctuation rules, rhetorical terms, knowledge about genres and conventions of writing, strategies for analyzing texts or engaging sources. I spend about ten percent of my class time teaching them. And I have often created videos, encouraging students to watch them, so we can use class time for more discussion and practice. But students didn’t like it. I hated using the “content” from one year to the next; I want to cover new issues, approach them differently, and so on. I would rather find the ten percent class time and integrate content within interaction and practice more seamlessly. read full post…

Some time ago, while I was teaching a first-year writing course that only had international students, after a good class discussion about the importance of writing courses like that as a place to learn some of the fundamentals of American higher education, one student followed me to my office to say how inspired he was by the discussion. But then he added, with tears in his eyes, that he was dropping out of that summer course. After finding out how much the course would cost him during the summer term, he had talked to his parents in South Korea and decided to not take it.

Since the advent of what is called the “global turn” in Writing Studies, our scholarship, programs, and pedagogies have been increasingly focusing on internationalization as a critical educational goal of higher education that we are well positioned to help advance. This interest has manifested particularly in the discourse about multilingualism, translingualism, transnational writing research, and cross-cultural communicative competence. I strongly believe that, as writing teachers, we are an egalitarian, progressive, and sensitive community of scholars who appreciate what our students from around the world bring to our classrooms—how they continue to teach and inspire us—how all students benefit from the increasingly globalized classrooms. read full post…

After reading a new monthly issue of blog posts by a group of English teachers in Nepal earlier today, I had to get off my chest something that I’ve wanted to for a long time and pour it into a blog post. So, here it is, especially for friends and colleagues who have been told that you can’t produce good writing without perfect English or that good scholarship needs to meet a certain standard of quality and rigor and whatnot. The standards are usually local (often cast successfully as global and objective for a long time), they’re highly political (used for maintaining structures of privilege), and most of those who maintain the systems of privilege probably believe that it is all meritocratic (so, don’t be too upset with them!).

Scholarship and the Global Peripheries

The word “scholarship” brings to my mind another term, “scholar,” or a highly learned individual who writes to produce new knowledge, who publishes in prestigious venues, and whose ideas lead and shape his [yeah, I still can’t get rid of the male image in my mind] academic discipline. Growing up in one third world country (until high school) and then living and working in another (for more than a decade), I also never considered anyone in those parts of the world as producers of new and significant knowledge in the academic fields that I studied.

In fact, I still struggle in my mind to think about regular teachers (especially those in the developing world) as scholars and writers in the same way as those whose manuscripts qualify among the five or ten percent of total submissions made to established journals in their respective fields at the few global centers. Deep in my mind, the ideas and experiences of people in the global peripheries—outside of the hallowed institutions of knowledge at geopolitical and cultural centers where there are more resources, opportunities, and the power to define what counts as significant—don’t seem to carry as much value, even for their own contexts, even for their own work and lives.

So, yes, I am confessing that I can’t help feeling that the work of the five or ten percent of those who get published at the global centers (and that group is not “them” for me, I am part of it, however poorly, as I write), those who have doctoral degrees and are usually tenured at prestigious universities, those who have made it to the top of the professional ladders … best determine what counts as genuine scholarship. I automatically imagine that the extreme minority of seeming geniuses as the standard bearers of quality, novelty, substance, and significance with regard to content, method, and professional practice in any field. read full post…

When I first learned about massive open online courses, the truly massive xMOOC types, I thought, OMG, now I too can finally educate the world from the convenience of my laptop and the high speed internet that I have. In fact, I had just bought a new MacBook Air at the time. And, being a writing teacher, I wanted to teach writing, because, you know, everyone in the world needs to “write better.” Perfect.

What I needed in order to get started was a course banner, especially an image that would represent the kind of writing that I teach, “academic” writing.

“Academics” has to do with wisely thinking through existing knowledge and generating new ideas, so I thought the best image to represent it would be, oh, yes, the “owl”!

However, before I settled on the owl and slapped a big wise owl image at the top of the screen, I wanted to take a quick moment to ensure that most (if not all) students/ participants from around the world would get my point when they see my course banner.

Five minutes of Googling led to another five, then an hour, and finally after three full hours of reading what I found about the owl as a symbol, I was discouraged. I lost my confidence in the power of my laptop, as well as my years of experience teaching while tethered to one particular context at a time. I sat there, face-in-palms, somewhat glad that I didn’t use a local metaphor to claim to convey a particular meaning universally. I was glad I knew how to Google.

While reading this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, I thought about a similar number of things about MOOCs that many people in the media and the mainstream MOOCosphere seem either unable or unwilling to learn:

1. There is no such thing as MOOC, only many types of MOOCs, with many kinds of them making the original acronym sound very funny.

2. If “nearly half of registrants never engage with any of the content,” then it’s time to stop touting the “total number” of people who click on the “sign up” button.

3. If people signing up for multiple courses are most active, but even those lose interest after taking the sixth course, then there is probably something about online and massive courses that has failed to bring about magic solutions to the “crisis” in education. read full post…

Yes, going to the library is an assignment in most classes I teach–even in college. Tell me in the comments section if I don’t convince you why this is an important assignment for a college course. Read on.

I wish I didn’t have to say this, but the library contains materials that the Internet doesn’t. Using the library may not be as easy as clicking on hyperlinks, but libraries contain the knowledge created by societies around the world over the course of centuries and in some cases millennia. Not all books have been scanned by Google. Yes, there is a “search” function on the Internet (the library’s version of it is far less efficient–although that’s the assignment you are required to do, so keep reading); but the library has a powerful “organize” function that the Internet almost totally lacks. The library has quality control, professional librarians ready to help you, different types of services, and often fun activities — not to mention archives, lounges, study areas, often free coffee . . . but, wait, how do you compare the last few items with the Internet? And I’ve not even told you what the library assignment is. It’s fun– just read on. read full post…

Another post about #clmooc. Last week, I followed other colleagues’ work with great interest but couldn’t create anything myself. But building on that spirit, I’d like to start this post by sharing my main idea through an illumination.

Images can be relatively universal, but because their imitation or representation of the world or ideas are mediated by selection, perspective, perception, and interpretation, even the seemingly most universal images create room for complex conversations.

While attending a talk on campus (at Stony Brook University) this afternoon, given by Elana Sohamy, an Israeli scholar, I had a moment of despair.

The title of her talk today was “multilingual testing” and the backdrop of her presentation was the monolingual regime of language testing and its effects on multilingual language users across the world.

As teachers of language and writing/communication, we keep saying in theory that language learners take 3-5 or even 9-11 years to be fluent and accurate in a new language, depending on where and how they learn. But in practice, we continue to resort, very quickly and thoughtlessly, to the logic of pragmatism, of institutional policy, of the need to make sure that our multilingual students can perform in English. read full post…

Since I made a trip to New York City to visit the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning (SUNY COIL) last week, I’ve been thinking about and trying to find and read any scholarship on how writing teachers in colleges/universities in the US incorporate the element of “global citizenship” (GC) into their teaching.

I knew that the concept of GC is defined and perceived in a wide variety of ways, including as a terrible idea (one that promotes world governance and undermines local cultures and values), as a proxy for imperialism and commercial globalization, as a fancy buzzword that is ultimately empty of practical use and meaning, as a useless ideal, and as a “chimerical idea” (as one professor called it when rejecting my proposal for a seminar paper in graduate school; maybe he saw that I hadn’t done enough research yet and thought that I couldn’t fully engage the complex debates surrounding the topic, or maybe he thought that I took the term at face value–whatever it was, he was the professor!).

But until this week, I didn’t know that there is actually a lot of scholarship in my own discipline that is more or less relevant to the topic. You know this is why I love my discipline, Composition and Rhetoric. The field is diverse, it is interdisciplinary, and if you start looking for resources, you find good ideas about almost anything. But I digress.

The increasing distance between how we learn, work, and communicate in the world outside and how we do so in academe has many implications. One of them is that our current educational models may become less relevant and useful in preparing our students for the world/professions outside. Another one is that our students will continue to be educated on the basis of local models that fail to take advantage of ideas, people, and cultures/communities in the broader world. I will try to revisit the issues more extensively some time in the future.

In this post, I share some thoughts and reflections about the concept of “community as curriculum” as I am using it in a graduate course here in SUNY Stony Brook. I borrow the idea from David Cormier (some of you may know him as the person who gave the original MOOCs their name and continues to add truly inspiring intellectual substance to the idea of “open learning”). You can read more about the concept from Dave’s blog here and here.

I normally design courses using an idea as the framework, to undergird the assignments and objectives. In this case, I wanted to experiment a “from x to y” approach to implementing a good idea. Let me explain why after sharing a little about the course itself.

The CourseOffered as part of a “teaching certificate” in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (and also cross-listed by the English Department), this graduate seminar focuses on the “global turn” in the study and teaching of rhetoric and writing (must note: this term is debated for very good reasons by scholars like Damian Baca and complicated by others like Canagarajah). Students survey/observe a few rhetorical traditions from around the world, exploring the works that they study along three different axes: historical/temporal, geopolitical/spatial, and ideational/thematic. They develop two consecutive but overlapping projects, the first to explore a particular tradition or phenomenon in rhetoric and the second to develop a theoretical framework geared toward informing pedagogical practices, formulating research method/questions, or some other academic or professional implementation of their particular exploration. The broader goal of the course is for students to develop an understanding and appreciation of rhetorical traditions beyond the mainstream (Greco-Roman-Anglo-American) history of rhetoric, situating that understanding in their current academic engagements and future prospects in anticipated professions/disciplines.

The themes that students are studying include transaction and trust (through textual communication and in other rhetorical acts), knowledge and epistemology (how knowledge is defined and practiced in different social/cultural contexts), education and what it means to teach and learn, and (as technologies become ubiquitous in education) how mediation and access as well as privacy and sharing shape these themes as they have to do with rhetoric. So, toward the end of the semester, the class together explores how new media and modes of communication are affecting rhetorical practices in and across contexts, examining how the foundational forces of the major rhetorical traditions are shaping contemporary rhetorical practices.

And that is where the notion of the course developing into a community comes in.

The Community
Early in the semester, I started invited some of the authors whose works the class is reading as guest speakers via Skype. This opened the class’s door to the outside world, using a technology that has become a regular means of communication in both our private and professional lives.

The Skype-based conversations have been informal, usually prompted by students’ questions about the authors’ works/ideas and highly engaging and often fun-filled. I cannot imagine a more convenient and more powerful mode of teaching than letting my students talk to scholars whom I tremendously respect. So far, we’ve had the privilege of inviting Bronwyn Williams, Damian Baca, Keith Lloyd, and LuMing Mao (all teaching in the US at this time); we’re planning to talk to a few scholars from other countries, as well as a few more from the US.

One of the semi-virtual class meetings that is now in the planning is going to be with Iswari Pandey’s class at University of California Northridge. We are also planning to hold a Twitter Chat (or “summit” as I like to call it) with an growing network of scholars and students around the class.

This is how the class is gradually becoming a community; the course, which started by being dominated by reading and writing about scholarly texts is becoming a community of people sharing ideas and inspiration. Here is a video by Dave Cormier explaining how education is gradually moving from course to community. My class embodied not just the final idea but the process of evolution as well. Let me explain why.

The Course As CommunityI didn’t want the course to start like a community. A community is built, not just found and joined. In the past two years, I have learned a lot (from a project with my colleague Christopher Petty) about the importance of students’ confidence, comfort, and confidentiality as teachers increasingly encourage/require them to publish unfinished and/or personal thoughts/ideas for increasingly larger audiences. Those of us who value, love joining, and promote professional communities online often forget that we took time to develop confidence ourselves. We often hesitated (or even hated) to use new tools because we didn’t find their use/objective meaningful. Now that we’ve developed confidence and benefit from (or enjoy) being in our professional networks, we shouldn’t try to force our students to simply start with, rather grow an interest in, joining professional communities.

In fact, anyone “joining” professional networks/communities actually “creates” a community for them. So, for instance, when I join a new Facebook group developed by other parents from the local school district, I start making my connections/community, usually one at a time. If I am not savvy using Facebook, my community-building efforts may be slower, harder, and less exciting. I should not expect all my students to quickly and equally embrace the idea of joining a community of scholars created for the class. Frankly, there are not many rhetoric and writing scholars in any established social/professional networks. I am essentially asking my students to do something that is often not recognized as truly academic and educationally meaningful. And I need to be aware of all these issues.

That said, I also tremendously value what scholars like Dave Cormier are saying. They are really capturing the developments, the possibilities, and opportunities in powerful, often visionary, ways.

In the case of this course, there is a second reason why I am encouraging students to explore and experiment the affordances of social/professional networking. The students may wish the class blog, Facebook page, and Twitter account to be retired at the end of semester; but our attempt to connect and have conversations with scholars across cultural/national borders fits like hand in glove with the intellectual/educational objective of the course. So, our ideal is not only “curriculum as community” but also “curriculum as context-crossing.” Students are gradually crossing cultural/national borders as they shift their attention from text alone to people, practices, and perspectives in the real world.

Let me conclude by adding one more thought about why do this community-creating, border-crossing, and conversing with (rather than just reading and writing) about different rhetorical traditions and practices. Students pursuing careers related to the teaching and scholarship of writing and rhetoric have a range of powerful reasons to pay attention to the emergence of the global in this discipline. Within the humanities at large–including English Studies and Rhetoric & Composition—scholarship and professional networking that cross national borders are turning the tide from a one-way traffic of texts and ideas until recently to the emergence of multilateral exchange of ideas, collaborative work, and hyper-connected professional communities. Even within the borders of any nation, academics have started paying attention to how transnational/global forces are influencing the production and use/adaptation of texts, ideas, and professional practices.

I am excited that my students are appreciating how we are shifting our focus from texts to contexts, from course to community, from reading and writing to joining ongoing conversation on the issues covered by the course.